As an example, normality means a person can, EG, create an elephant within their home, and torture it. Under preference utilitarianism, the torture of the elephant upsets the values of a large number of people, it’s treated as a public bad and has to be taxed as such. Even when we can’t see it happening, it’s still reducing our U, so a boundaryless prefu optimizer would go in there and says to the elephant torturer “you’d have to pay a lot to offset the disvalue this is creating, and you can’t afford it, so you’re going to have to find a better outlet (how about a false elephant who only pretends to be getting tortured)”.
But let’s say there are currently a lot of sadists and they have a lot of power. If I insist on boundaryless aggregation, they may veto the safety deal, so it just wouldn’t do. I’m not sure there are enough powerful sadists for that to happen, political discourse seems to favor publicly defensible positions, but [looks around] I guess there could be. But if there were, it would make sense to start to design the aggregation around… something like the constraints on policing that existed before the aggregation was done. But not that exactly.
But not preserving normality is the appeal :/
As an example, normality means a person can, EG, create an elephant within their home, and torture it. Under preference utilitarianism, the torture of the elephant upsets the values of a large number of people, it’s treated as a public bad and has to be taxed as such. Even when we can’t see it happening, it’s still reducing our U, so a boundaryless prefu optimizer would go in there and says to the elephant torturer “you’d have to pay a lot to offset the disvalue this is creating, and you can’t afford it, so you’re going to have to find a better outlet (how about a false elephant who only pretends to be getting tortured)”.
But let’s say there are currently a lot of sadists and they have a lot of power. If I insist on boundaryless aggregation, they may veto the safety deal, so it just wouldn’t do. I’m not sure there are enough powerful sadists for that to happen, political discourse seems to favor publicly defensible positions, but [looks around] I guess there could be. But if there were, it would make sense to start to design the aggregation around… something like the constraints on policing that existed before the aggregation was done. But not that exactly.